We had an awesome adventure last weekend centered around the Kluane Chilkat International Bike Race. It started out with a beautiful blue sky, flat water, fast ferry ride from Juneau to Haines. Carrie, Torsten, and Matt were on the ferry with Adelie, Chip, Missy, Mark, and Julie. Chip “Dr. Blokus” brought along his favorite game..
After grabbing dinner and some new fishing gear for Torsten, we went on up to Haines Junction (Canada) and camped with a lot of bikers. Here’s the start of the race on Satuday.
Carrie, Chip, and Matt rode as Team US Postal Service, with Missy acting as our team captain. Julie and Mark rode the whole race (150 miles–the race was 148.1, but they rode bikes from the campground to the start of the race). Chip rode legs 1-4 (69.4 miles) of the race, and was a bit wet and cold. Once he got up into the mountains, the skies cleared up and things warmed up, just in time for Matt to hop on to ride legs 5 and 6 (36.3 miles). Carrie got this great shot of Matt heading down the road after the station between legs 5 and 6.
Here’s Chip after Leg 4, escorted by Missy, Adelie, and Torsten:
After thoroughly enjoying Leg 6 (check out the altitude profile of Leg 6!), Matt handed off to Carrie (here she is riding off down the scenic road), who did Leg 7 and went on to do about a third of Leg 8 (the line at Customs to get back into the U.S. was a killer!!). Carrie rode a little over 30 miles.
Chip cleared customs and jumped right back in to join Mark and Julie at about midway through leg 7. So the US Postal Service team “cheated” (by covering parts of legs 7 and 8 twice) to get the red lantern (last to finish). But we had a blast and that was our only goal. Here’s the whole team (along with the “finishers”–Adelie and Torsten).
As usual, the whole gallery is available.
